How is an African psycho different from an American psycho? Alain Mabanckou, a prolific young writer who was born in the French Congo and now teaches at UCLA, wants to tease and taunt you with that question, just as he wants you to squirm as his protagonist, Grégoire, descends into manic, bloodthirsty delirium. Inspired by Scarface (he’s seen the movie over 50 times) and the infamous killing sprees of his idol, Angoualima (whose grave site he visits for morale-boosting sessions), Grégoire is a comic failure as a criminal, a self-mythologizing car mechanic who can only seem to decide on one thing: On December 29, he will kill his girlfriend, Germaine.

But what’s really tormenting him? Well, just listen to Grégoire’s monologues and the roots of his rage are clear. Abandoned by his parents in his youth, he’s still seething over the stigma of having been a child of the streets. He’s disgusted by the corrupt politicians and insipid media of his cesspool of a country, and by the squalor of the slum, dubbed “He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot,” in which he lives. The drunks and thieves, the pimps and prostitutes and sex tourists—they all turn his stomach and call for a swift, cleansing act of violence. This is Taxi Driver for Africa’s blank generation: not revolution, but pyschobabble and serial murder. “I had sworn to myself that I was going to clean up He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot,” Grégoire says, “give it back some dignity, rid it of its refuse, of its detritus, of its filth.” African Psycho is a deftly ironic Grand Guignol, a pulp fiction vision of Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” that somehow manages to be both frightening and self-mocking at the same time. — Anderson Tepper